driftwood

I don’t think I’ll

Ever understand how your smile

Could be so sweet

When you kept your soul in the stock room

And I gotta ask about it, because i saw it advertised outside

But I can’t find anything I’ve shown up for in here.

The yellow I collected on the hiking trail that day

Was probably more for me

And proof of how I felt;

That I wasn’t quite crazy,

I was just a stricken bowerbird

Hoping to make you smile with each little gift of color. It’s all I knew, it was the fastest way I thought I could reach you

When sounds were too slow

And comprehension decades away.

When you are in pain,

Why do you disappear?

I thought that , at least, when there is pain

It’s maybe a little bit better to be next to

-breathing the same air as-

the other person

So at least you know with each breath

you aren’t the only one metabolizing this hell.

I am so sorry if I ever brought you there. I just didn’t want to be alone.

Please. someday, I hope you can tell me

Which other dimension you were in

That glitched into mine

And made me think we could have been

In the same love

I had a dream once where all hospital patients awaiting different types of surgery were in the same open, long fluorescent lit room, and there’s only one surgeon. And according to the bureaucracy there,

You just have to wait your turn.

Of course, you never know when.

Each person floating in their own little vat of fluids, hooked up to all the monitors

Moaning, screaming, praying, disassociating. Torturously awaiting their healing. Playing tug of war with pain

Hoping to gain more time, which comes with more chance to be treated and relieved.

I’m in my vat feeling like I never was anyone at all. Why are they keeping us alive if they don’t care about our suffering?

And that’s the whole existence there. The wakefulness, uncertainty, the waiting, and the unbearable pain. You’re just always incomplete, waiting for the pain to end in an apathetic production line.

Love, please don’t go when things get hard.

Yes it’s still hard but we are going to want to do it

Together

The way you carried me across the creek piggyback.

When we went back, you seemed in a rush

And I looked at the western dusk on the darkening water and somehow onew, with a twinge of sweetness

I don’t think I’ll

Ever understand how your smile

Could be so sweet

When you kept your soul in the stock room

And I gotta ask about it, because i saw it advertised outside

But I can’t find anything I’ve shown up for in here.

The yellow I collected on the hiking trail that day

Was probably more for me

And proof of how I felt. That I wasn’t quite crazy,

I was just a bowerbird

Hoping to make you smile with each gleaming gift of color. It’s all I knew, it was the fastest way I thought I could reach you: through the light,

When sounds were too slow

And comprehension decades away.

When you are in pain

Why do you disappear?

I thought that , at least, when there is pain

It’s maybe a littl bit better to be breathing the same air as the other person

So you know you aren’t the only one absorbing this reality.

Please someday, I hope you can tell me

Which dimension you were in

That glitched into mine

And made me think we could have been

Where the trees hold memory

And know your footsteps

There are still paths through the wild, it seems

Run by the creatures that know more than you’ve ever had to unlearn

Remember your mother

And the deep dark

Remember the codes of your stars within the silence

And the pulsing night

Where your talents are not all for nothing

Your thoughts seed resonant ripples

And each conscious choice is witnessed

The other sufferers are here. They have been waiting just as much as you have.

The torture of days unwitnessed

rocking yourself to sleep, alone.

Waiting

For nothing.

No one here

Except everyone

You beautiful, fierce thing. You may rest now. It has all been

For nothing

If I was meant to be asleep.. well it’s not happening. I really can’t.

I think I may be coming back online because my nervous system is feeling the ripples of the years of heartbreak. It feels like too much. Why am I sensitizing myself in a society that always told me I was too much, I felt too much; where femininity and sensitivity is mocked and crushed.

I don’t know where to go to escape this feeling, truly. I act fine but I am consumed by these things, along with emotions I have yet to understand. The emotional body, the physical, and the mental are separate entities in treatment. I struggle the least with physical pain, although it has been notable 11/10 at times.

The innocence you lose when you get older is that which thought nothing bad would happen to you. Then it does and it traumatizes your parents and you blame yourself. Then you carry that for years and wonder why you’re not getting as far as you used to. You wonder why your passions died as you realize some people will indeed love to take more from you than they give. The world could take everything and you still won’t feel like you’ve done enough. So you give up in a lot of ways.

I relinquish any feeling of safety for I know there is none. HAH! I throw out the notions that a good education, ethics, intelligence and hard work are always rewarded. That there are mostly good people in high positions. That one is strange.

Is it such a far flung future to imagine ourselves without hierarchy; I guess that’s how nature goes, albeit brutal. And all the love in the world can’t clean up the brutality of it all. Love can’t change things; maybe it makes it right..

It does seem likely this may be a prison sentence for the soul; limitations and darkness, fog, mire.

So I’ve actually been spending my time getting a phd in human suffering. If depression does anything, it might do that well. And no one will ever know your personal battle. But I think others can see it because they’re also getting a phd. For a decade now I’ve been studying the nature of human suffering and it is the absolute most baffling fucking thing.

But what if tears do actually count for something in another dimension? What if the heartache catalyzes new things? What if the worst imagineable pain exists for a reason?

Who is to say we aren’t all alchemists?

All the time I just listen the most grotesque stories about hardship and survival. Like Mr. Ballen on YouTube. Podcasts like “this is actually happening”; books like “the indifferent stars above” which is about the Donner Party just hanging on through a brutal winter only to not make it. Or “man’s search for meaning” by survivor Viktor Frankl, I’ve read at least four times now.

But I don’t think anything mental can prepare you for real life trauma. It’s as if I might be trying to protect myself by imagining the worst possible things happening. Just so I know. But nothing prepares you for actually living through it. I’m just trying to understand why it happens.

Also social media is strange and idk why I’m doing this. Maybe because I’m just tired of hiding how fucked up I feel.

Maybe there will be a day where my body remembers it all. Or forgets it. I don’t know what I have to do to get rid of it. Maybe I just have to hold it until it alchemizes. Or not. Maybe you just hold it like Sisyphus, even if you don’t think you can push any more. Just hold it. Not because you believe you’ll reach the top, but because you just can’t let go.

I have broken open. I have somehow seen the unseeable. I dream of this fractal palace we come from; it comes mostly as music

(which I forget upon waking.) It’s the only proof I have.

I have alchemized pain, and have more yet to do. I have so much more real work- I have catching up to do. My soul hasn’t been here in a while. I have been asleep. And awake at night to avoid the crushing weight, the sharp walls of sound, the prison that all of this is.

Maybe the pain of not belonging will mean something someday. Maybe it always belonged out on the road. Maybe it was always meant to be so untameable, so obscure and silent.

I am quite the same now in spirit as I used to be, but yet again I feel I’m ready to burn this desert. I’ll rain down as incandescent ashes. Yea, it’s possible to cry and laugh at the same time, I do it all the time now.

Rain.

That pure fractal noise

The way things fall as they may across landscapes. So natural and free. Did I ever have wilderness in me as much as I do now?

& oh god, the grief of what I thought I could do with love.

The ache of not creating.

I still may be able to.

I look for you still

On the streets, in the park, at the dances.

Does no one else search like I do?

I was at the edge of the Grand Canyon

Imagining the entire depths full of you.

But could you really be so grand

When I kiss you

And my eyes are closed in the dark

So love,

Please awaken me.

I didn’t know the dreams could get worse.

I told them I thought about leaving this place. I trusted them

And they took me against my will. Thoughtless white florescense

I never thought I would see those glimpses of hell. I tried to sleep through it.

But the experience may have been the whole purpose somehow.

Did you see me?

I was curled up on the floor

staring wide eyed at the wall

crying for you.

Did you hear me?

Love,

I chose this body to carry me back to you. I feel you in each pulse and breath. Your ache is more real to me than anything else here.

So I feel it all.

Trying to find my way back home

without memory

Love,

may I find you wandering too

And hope we don’t miss.

I miss you.

I think I’ve seen you around.

I am you and we are everything.

I carry you with me always.

and fell to earth with such velocity it burned all it was.

A tarot card

A small hope

A neon spark

Now gone to darkness again.

I always think to say goodbye to feeling anything at all.

But I’ve been told to repeat:

And feel full

In serenity

Your intense gaze

your wanting

is my gravity now

What it tastes like

For some brief moments I was nothing but yours

Because when I sleep I get closer to you in time

Our beginning or our end, I can’t know.

The world is precarious right now

Like a heavy tree leaning in the rain..

soon I will crack and fall

There is only

Like little physics experiments to see where it lands

Then take the most time to recollect and carry it back up and out again

Gory, battered, but healing somehow each time.

The test is how high it can go

And for how long

With miles of empty air underneath and the ground so far away

That the flying may never feel like falling

But then it will anyway

my Icarus heart

This isn’t a new feeling, it isn’t even all of the feeling I could be feeling.

Half bleed to hope. Give her blood sacrifice. The order will be received;

Returned in full.

This fools heart feels larger, bolder.

Fear is the everyday companion

To be noted then fought against..

Here you are, some divine occurrence

Marked by important hours

Reflecting golden amongst all the other days

Patience, contemplation. Statuette.

I could paint you now,

Study the features of your face, neck, arms, chest, legs

As one would study a fascination.

If I could just touch all of you, so tenderly

That time would friction against my fingertips and draw itself slow

So I would be able to feel you more,

longer..

Already my greed consumes my thoughts,

Wanting to cling to every moment that has passed.

I seem to fail to remember the full scope and depth

Of the touch your lips gave mine..

I could draw it out

Longer

The water is cold

The fear is still

May my nights turn to warm days

Staring into my gold western sky

All that’s led me here will cause another end or beginning and both.

I can no longer cling,

But fall into current

Just fall

Because you are in danger but you can never be truly lost …

And if I were to lose myself in you- the easy impulse- then I could be lost.

Steady, practiced, I move now.

And pull into motion some nebula of possibilities..

Here’s the thing: I don’t want to date either. Dating is terribly difficult, awkward, full of danger, failure, hurt, regret. Dating is the worst.